Dragon Chimera - Final Submission

 This week I replaced the rigged model with the final model and refined the skinning in areas I didn't get to last week.

Dragon Chimera - Week 5

This week I refined the wing deformations and did a first of skinning with the final feather placement. The animation below was done by Tori.

 

The wing deformations are driven by aim constraints, following a ribbon being deformed by the four primary feather joint aims. The primary feather joints are driven by the wing rotation to maintain equal angle between their parent joint and the subsequent joint. When the wing compresses, this would cause the feathers to cross, so I added an expression to scale the primary aims driving the ribbon (effectively pulling them all into the center)

The expression is an offset asymptote with a clamp.

Since feathers should not have any stretch, I wrote a python script to quickly block skinning on all of the feathers -- the script finds the joints with the largest influence on a mesh and evenly weights the vertices to that joint or joints so the entire mesh has a the same values.

Dragon Chimera - Week 4

 This sprint, I revised the wing deformations and made another iteration of the IK/FK spine that is more stable when rotating and transferred the rig to the game-ready base model.

Dragon Chimera - Week 3

I started working with the feather placement to create feather joints with a dynamic aim constraint to drive their orientation.

 I've been making progress on fixing the gimbal issues on the IK spine by implementing a ribbon system to act as an intermediary between the skin joints and the IK joints. This is still a work in progress though.

I worked on getting a lattice deformer to support the use of motion paths to drive the IK skeleton but ultimately we decided the return on control was not worth the time it would take to debug fully.

Dragon Chimera - Week 2

 This week, I worked on the first pass of the full IK/FK rig on spine and limbs. I encountered some issues with rotation on the X-axis using purely joints on the IK spine, and will likely switch to a combination ribbon and spline IK for the next iteration.

I created a first pass range of motion animation for quickly testing the rig deformations and future functionality.

Additionally, I spent more time researching the mechanics of avian flight to better understand desired outcome of the feather rig.

Dragon Chimera - Week 1

 This week I researched rigging solutions for wings and long-bodied creatures (snakes / dragons) as well as setting up a basic FK rig so we can start on animation blocking early next sprint.

Lighting A Scene (Module 4)

 

Asset Lighting Scenario (Module 3)

 

Environment Lighting Set Up

 

Three Point Lighting Set Up

Glykon Lighting Setup

Neutral / White Lighting

 

Colored Coded Lighting (Red = Key, Green = Fill, Blue  = Rim)

Henri IV Lighting Setup

Neutral / White Lighting

Colored Coded Lighting (Red = Key, Green = Fill, Blue  = Rim)

Stranger Things VR Final

This week I finalized the full IK/FK for the Demogorgon at the beginning of the week so our animator could get final animations in game. I skinned the new retopologized Demogorgon model to the base skeleton when I received it. It required some minor tweaking to the joint positions, so I also handled the animation retargeting in Unreal.

Additionally, I fixed some outstanding bugs from previous weeks.

I added a unique hand grasp pose for when the player grabs nothing as the 'psychic' pose we had as default didn't provide enough feedback and confused some players.

I fixed the animation mirroring issue that previously occurred when grabbing objects with a unique animation that caused both hands to animate simultaneously.

I fixed the nav-mesh where the player was unable to teleport between certain objects as well as adding a no teleport zone where the Demogorgon spawns to alleviate some camera clipping.

I fixed the Demogorgon animations and animation blueprint for clipping into the wall, clipping itself, and allowing the hurt animation to play even while the player is in its sensing radius.

Interactive Character First Pass

 This week I created the FK skeleton and rig for the Demogorgon early in the week so our animator could start working as early as possible. I started work on the full IK/FK functionality of the rig, but did finish it before making this post.

Additionally, I made some minor changes to the project such as increasing the size of the dice slightly to make them easier to see and grab, fixing the angle of the player hands, and adjusting the lighting done by other team members.

I made some progress in fixing my unused snap code from last week, but did not keep it for this submission as it seemed to cause issues with the other snapping objects.

VR Hands (Final Pass)

This week I completely rebuilt the hand skeleton and rig in accordance with the new mesh. The new rig includes meta-carpal control, keyable meta-carpal channels, and keyable finger curl channels in addition to the basic FK rig. I auto-skinned the hands initially to pass them on to the animator while I worked on the final skinning.

Prior to replacing the hands I got the props grabbing in place with socket-based snapping. When the skeleton was replaced the new sockets did not seem to behave in the same way and we were unable to replicate it in the given time, so we switched back to the "snap" type on the grab component.

I made a second VR Pawn and Animation Blueprint that worked in conjunction with my snapping, but it was obsolete given other fixes, so we continued using the original blueprints.

VR Clean Pass

 This week I added meta-carpal control to the hands rig to improve animation options for grabbing different objects. I resized the skeleton according to the updated hand models and reskinned them to the low-poly mesh.

VR Proxy Hand Rig

This week I created an FK rig for the player hands.

I originally made separate skeletons for each hand with the root at the base of the wrist.

After fixing the skeleton hierarchy, I retargeted the animations to the new skeleton in Unreal.

The proxy animations were done by Paige Thorsen and the hands were modeled by Tristan Spear.

Perforce Documentation:

Week 6: Composition

Composition: L Composition

Target Artist: Brian Froud

References:

Perspective / Transportation: Rocking Horse

 

Character Redesign: Basic Lighting